AN: Woohoo! Double update, yay! :D Except... well, when I did all my proofreading I realised there's quite a bit of technobabble in this chapter, which is something I love to read but can occasionally let myself get carried away with in fanfics. :/ Le sigh. If it's too much, by all means, please tell me! This one was kinda hard to get down and I admit I used the technobabble as a filler while I was sitting there, thinking 'wtf was I about to write?'
Anyhoo, on with the chapter! Shoutouts in the bottom AN for a couple of the reviews that stuck out and really made me smile -I neeeded them, thank you! Thank you so much!
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GLaDOS paused, fingertips poised above the control console, and with some difficulty she waited out the shudders that had rippled through her android frame. She hadn't yet pinpointed the cause, which annoyed her, and even more frustrating was that they were becoming more frequent, longer, and more debilitating. Half an hour ago, she'd been forced to kneel because she lost all but the least of her motor functions. As was the pattern, a long and severe episode like that should have been followed by two or three bouts of faint, barely-perceptible twitches. Like flinching, not like losing control of your damn hand!
"This isn't your fault." She said kindly to her reflection in a shiny silver panel. "If [Subject Name Here] hadn't been such a violent lunatic then she wouldn't have been a danger to the facility and you wouldn't have had to sacrifice highly-beneficial short term Science for minimally-beneficial long term Science." GLaDOS told herself firmly. "So this isn't your fault."
Her reflection, a little warped by the metal sheet and entirely lacking in any sort of facial structure, gave no outward reaction to the statement. But it made GLaDOS feel a little calmer for having said it aloud, and she looked away to continue her manual reprogramming, fingertips practically dancing over the dated keypad, making loud clacking noises. The rear-projection screen, which showed only a black and green display, gave off a neon glow not unlike raw nuclear waste.
If it wasn't a Required Operations Apparatus GLaDOS would have put her fist through it in frustration when she found out she couldn't simply hack the brain-dead automaton of a computer that was monitoring her turbine engine power plant.
The redundancy of this system continued to astound her. Ninety-nine percent of the facility was a massive, glorious extention of her own body. Nothing was beyond her power -she could make test chambers literally from thin air and spare panels, she could manipulate complicated machinery with the grace and precision of a skilled artist, or she could design and build immense superstructures on a whim and then tear them apart in whatever manner took her fancy. Explosives, careful deconstruction, corrosive chemicals, supernova temperatures or brute temper tantrums.
Yet there were crucial system functions kept out of her reach, things that could change the entire facility for a significantly better or worse outcome, and she was practically hamstrung trying to access them.
She added a few more expletives in capital letters to her growing file on the 'Old Aperture Employee Database' and resumed pacing.
"What if this had been an emergency?" GLaDOS muttered, pausing when another shudder ran through her. "What if that moron had done even more damage? I know he's not smart enough to have created and deliberately left behind some sort of 'time bomb' that would kill me after a few years, but if I hadn't thought to chase down this anomoly of discredited Science then I may well have been in trouble." She sighed. The physical spasms passed, though this time she was left with residual feelings of a headache and something her extensive database could only define as nausea. "And just what in the name of Science is happening to me?" She added in a yell, thumping her fist into the wall.
Said wall did not withstand the force of the blow and GLaDOS could only glower at the new hole in the formerly-pristine metal.
"This is a serious problem." GLaDOS mused aloud, wrenching her titanium limb from the flimsy aluminium sheet. The prehistoric computer, unconscious of her dilemma, continued to process her commands. The only thing it was any good at was blocking her every attempt to override all systems and take control of the power plant infrastructure for herself. Otherwise, the CPU in it was pootling along at a miniscule twenty-something gigahertz, meaning the calculated processing time of her commands was somewhere in the range of minutes before completion.
And GLaDOS really had no choice but to wait it out. She didn't dare return her consciousness to her main chassis (oh, it was so tempting, though) because she had to keep an eye on the Fail-A-Saurus Wrecks power plant mainframe.
"Oh, sweet Motherboard preserve me." She whimpered aloud upon realising what she'd just thought. "My witticism processor! That little moro-"
The somewhat-anticipated bout of nausea and shudders hit with unexpected force and she collapsed, her vision blackened for a frightening moment. She felt no pain from the impact with the floor, but she did hear the crackle of live electricity in places it shouldn't be. GLaDOS couldn't move her head though, and without cameras in the area, she had no way to know why. Her left arm refused to obey her commands -it jerked and then gave no other response except to spit a bit of smoke from the operational end of the Compact Portal Device. GLaDOS' right hand, draped behind her back, felt strangely detached. Had it broken off? She could twitch the fingers, but there was no sensory response from anywhere between her elbow and wrist.
Putting the intermittent scraping noise of her trembling body out of mind, GLaDOS closed her eyes and tried to focus, attempting to construct at least some form of resistance to this strange effect. It was difficult whilst under the influence of the reaction. Code strings were scrambled when she tried to enforce them and the programming kept punching holes in even her usual firewalls. It was like it was part of a powerful, base OS program designed to put her through hell at random intervals.
Could Wheatley's brief integration with her chassis have done this? Was it a dormant virus that the humans might have added to another Core's hard-drive, to bring about total destruction of the facility if she was ever dethroned?
Yes, the annoying little organics had been able to give her life, but surely their depravity didn't reach that far? That was like... like...
"BASE- cominatCHA...phzzt... base-bas-b-baa-baa-BAse-"
Well at least there was no one to bear witness to that embarassing little string of gibberish. GLaDOS' body jerked as though struck and she saw her knee in the edge of her jammed vision, felt the heelspring catch on something and then yank free, and the next thing she heard was the raw, low-pitched grinding noise of electricity arcing through open air. Even small animals and infant humans instinctively knew to fear a noise like that. To make such a sound, she reasoned that a major power supply cable had been broken and was now short-circuiting against something.
GLaDOS hoped it wasn't her fractured android body.
Then a jagged, blue-white curl of voltage lit up the dim control room and she saw another threat to her form. A thick, seeping puddle of fluid leaking from somewhere, creeping towards her limp arm. GLaDOS only managed a warble, it was meant to be a whimper, every digital inch of her mainframe hoping for luck even as she calculated the rate of flow, the viscosity of the fluid, the angle and composition of the floor's surface, plus variables such as the scattered metal shavings fallen from her newly-constructed body interfering with any of the aforementioned factors.
Another scratchy whimper as, in this exceedingly dangerous and potentially fatal situation, GLaDOS attempted to vocalise her plea. Her body had stopped moving as of thirty-seven seconds ago, but she actually couldn't communicate anything to her limbs. Something was definitely broken, something was very, very broken. She was actually paralyzed. It was worse than her fixed-position chassis, she couldn't so much as look around or raise her head for comfort's sake.
"No... no..." GLaDOS' vocal processors abruptly straightened themselves out while she watched the leaking fluid arrive at the edge of the tiled floor surface. One half of the room had linoleum, but the section with the computers mounted in it was chunky, dirty, square tiles she absently measured at 12.5cm^2 each in size. The thick liquid had reached the edge, and almost teasingly, its' surface-tension caused it to swell heavily just there. The moment of truth, GLaDOS thought, watching it intently. It wasn't conventional oil -too thick, wrong color- and it wasn't coolant -same reasons- but a random thought nagged at her that it wasn't any kind of passive fluid either. In other words, it was an aggressive chemical compound, something acidic or flammable or-
It dripped off the linoleum and found a groove between the tiles, and with the new weight-momentum factors GLaDOS watched it both in real-time and with predictive calculation as the glistening fluid started to race between the tiles, zig-zagging downhill towards her paralyzed limb.
"No. No. No." She glared at the nonresponsive liquid, repeating her wishful mantra. Another noisy arc of electricity flashed across the room, giving her a new opportunity to examing the mysterious fluid. She registered the color first, it was dull orange, translucent with what looked like black crystalline particles mixed throughout. Given that, GLaDOS realised that the wayward liquid could only be one thing. Location, direction of flow, rate of flow, appearance and calculated texture all fell into place somewhat neatly as the definition of the fluid reached her conscious RAM and was processed -and the information blew fast through her mind with a near-explosive force. Aperture Science High-Tensile Semi-Elastic Energy Storage and Transference Gel.
Put simply, it was the stuff that made the Portal Device possible, the stuff that absorbed the immesurably huge amounts of energy put out by the pinprick black hole in the gun and turned that energy into a dimensional rift that could be placed and used like an ordinary doorway. It was self-propelling energy, just point and pull the trigger, the gun would let off a chunk of energy that would race away in a compact ball in only the first direction it had been able to move and in no other. Upon impact with a suitable surface, the 'splash' effect of the semi-solid energy would reach out to form the portal's edges, and its' elastic nature would keep it from spreading too far, forming a perfect, rounded shape pre-defined by the prongs mounted on the end of the Device. And the reserve supply of Gel stored in her abdomen was leaking.
Too much information.
GLaDOS groaned in pain under the force of it and her vision went black, her awareness shrank to a miniscule nothing and she was treated to a few sickening lurches. The last thing she got to see was a fork of energy spear into the leaking fluid at the same time that it touched the operational end of the Compact Portal Device, then she screeched as the full facility-wide mainframe crashed in on her once more, horrifyingly like the very first time she'd woken up, a blinding blur of senses then left her reeling.
Whole minutes later, the headache was fading and GLaDOS could make half-decent sense of her facility/body once more. What she noticed right away was a warning, a kind of horrible throbbing somwhere within the vast Enrichment Center. Almost reluctantly, she started rerouting camera systems and power supplies. She kept her virtual fingers crossed as the progressive feed made its' way through hallways she recalled walking along, until she reached the dead-end where she'd had to use portals due to the lack of access. The remains of the cabling were coiled against the wall, somewhat melted and smoking, looking much like they'd suffered the full force of the reactor output all in one microsecond. That left only one conclusion -that her android body had reacted to the super-charged fluid in part or whole before the compact Portal Device had, the cabling had been destroyed before being cut by the disappearance of the portals.
"I can't believe that moron's interference with my mainframe is still having reprocussions." GLaDOS grumbled sullenly, retreating from the area to focus on redesigning her android body. The concept of an android form was passable, of course, it was just that the Mark 1 clearly had some unforseen functional faults that needed to be ironed out. For Science.
Fortunately, the remote reports from the turbine power plant informed her that the computer working there hadn't been affected, and was still processing the commands she'd issued earlier. That meant she could relax -fractionally- and so instead of 'housekeeping' she could get straight to work on the Mark 2 android.
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AN: Yaye, done! And a bit longer than most of my other chapters too, so I'm rather pleased with this one despite how freaking difficult it was to write. ^_^ Anyway, here's my shouts, as promised, and in no particular order:
ITman496: Whee, I love writing technical stuff! Can you tell? :D
Ushiromae: Aww... :') thanks for understanding. I kind of belted out four or five chapters and then hit a lurch, nothing was happening, and with so few reviews but so many story alerts it was kinda bumming me out that no one felt like taking a few minutes to tell me what they thought. That's the point of reviews in the first place, isn't it? I don't mean (and certainly don't expect) blind adoration or anything like that, I mean well-constructed criticism, it's the best brain-food for a writer. It makes me think more, at least, makes me want to write more and see just what I can accomplish!
Faux Promises: Hehehe... I think that's kind of why I'm avoiding having little Wheatley in this story, to be honest. There's so much of him everywhere else, I'm tired of finding so few stories that don't have him in a starring role, so I'm writing my own! Though, if tons of people really want to see him... maybe I might give him another little cameo-spot... -evilsnicker-
GLaDHal: Ho hum, I didn't get my 25 reviews, did I? :( Still, I don't plan on abandoning my story just because so few people are reviewing! It's just a lot more encouraging to get detailed feedback than a dozen-odd notification emails from ... hehehe
Curtisimo: Hmm, plotty senses tingling? :O Well, I'm trying really hard to create something a little bit original, even if the deepest base theme is pretty much as old-hat as we can get. :/ Though, one of your ideas did touch very close on my original plotbunny idea, but I'm not telling which!
Erisna: Oh, Companion Cube's not out of this story! I haven't quite figured out exactly where to slot it in (it's a cube, so I'm not sure how to tell the gender of it... poll?) but I will think of something! :D Also -I love freerunning! I have a lot of plans for it in this story... and certain former test subjects have a lot of free time once they've graduated Uni, ne? ;)
SilverFreedom: Aww... -melts- thank you! There's a saying, 'a picture's worth a thousand words', so I figure, 'surely words can paint beautiful pictures too?' But I'm particularly artistically-challenged (my hand-drawn work looks something like the stuff that comes out of a cat's back-end). I work really hard on the imagery I'm trying to present, I re-read it so many times I get sick of seeing the page, so I'm really happy that managed to get my word-pictures across and you could see them. :D
Emerald Em: Hahahaha, tenacity! What a brilliant sound that word makes when you say it, huh? It sounds like something alive all by itself, say it out loud and the word sounds like some wild, caged thing that's going to fight to its' last breath just to taste free air and see the sun and sky once more. Awa... I started rambling... :x But yes, I will persevere! Ooh, that's a good one too... -wanders off mumbling random long words-
Ahem! One last thing: I'm going away to my dad's for the week after Christmas, so there won't be an update until after New Year's. My fingers are crossed I'll manage another chapter before I leave. The plan is to update on Monday, since I leave Tuesday morning, so you'd think that's plenty of time to get one more chapter done, right? ... Well, I certainly hope it is! Hahahaha!
Be safe, everyone, wherever you may be in the world. 'Tis the season for merriment and cheer. :)